My wife and I have on our living room wall a print of Hopper's Nighthawks. When I wrote about it here, I noted that I first saw the picture on the cover of an anthology of American literature, and that it put me in mind of some Hemingway stories--"The Killers" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." I've been looking at a lot of Hoppers lately and would add to the list "Hills Like White Elephants." In that story two characters, identified only as "the American and the girl with him," stop at a Spanish train station where, over drinks and against the backdrop of a symbolic landscape, the man tries to persuade the woman to have an abortion.
"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said. "It's not really an operation at all."
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in."
The girl did not say anything.
"I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural."
"Then what will we do afterward?"
"We'll be fine afterward. Just like we were before. . . . I know we will. You don't have to be afraid. I've known lots of people that have done it."
"So have I," said the girl. "And afterward they were all so happy."
To get an idea of how slippery this onslaught is, try it without the adverbs. "It's a simple operation, Jig. It's not an operation at all. It's to let the air in. It's not anything." Later, in response to the inevitable question about whether he loves her, the man replies: "I love you now." What a difference one too many words makes. In the context, "now" sounds like a threat. All his modifiers betray low character. In "A Clean, Well-LIghted Place" one of the waiters, the sensitive one, observes to himself that "some lived in it but never felt it," the "it" being "a nothing that he knew too well." It's the woman who feels it in this story.
The connection to Hopper, I think, is the sensation of being alone when you are with someone else. If you had to put into words why Nighthawks has such a desolating effect, isn't that some large part of it? Here is Hopper's Summer Evening. And Second Story Sunlight. And Office At Night. And Two on the Aisle. In his work only women are up to introspection. See Hotel Room, Summer Interior, Morning Sun.
"Hills Like White Elephants" is almost entirely in dialogue, but there are two paragraphs of description, and it is them I was thinking of when I said the conversation takes place against a symbolic landscape. The story opens:
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies.
And then at one point the girl gets up from the table and takes a short walk.
The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.
Only one of the two might have been the subject of a Hopper painting.
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